Re: Maudlin's Demon (Argument)

[George Levy]

List members I scanned Maudlin's paper. Thank you Russell. As I suspected I found a few questionable passages: Page417: line 14: "So the spatial sequence of the troughs need not reflect their 'computational sequence'. We may so contrive that any sequence of address lie next to each other spatially." Page 418 line 5: "The first step in our construction is to rearrange Klara's tape so that address T[0] to T[N] lie spatially in sequence, T[0] next to T[1] next to T[2], etc... How does Maudlin know how to arrange the order of the tape locations? He must run his task Pi in his head or on a calculator. Maudlin's reaches a quasi religious conclusion when he states: "Olympia has shown us a least that some other level beside the computational must be sought. But until we have found that level and until we have explicated the relationship between it and the computational structure, the belief that ...of pure computationalism will ever lead to the creation of artificial minds or the the understanding of natural ones, remains only a pious hope." Let me try to summarize: Maudlin is wrong in concluding that there must be something non-computational necessary for consciouness. Maudlin himself was the unwitting missing consciousness piece inserted in his machine at programming time  i.e., the machine's consciouness spanned execution time and programming time. He himself was the unwitting missing piece when he design his tape. The correct conclusion IMHO is that consciousness is independent of time, space, substrate and level and in fact can span all of these just as Maudlin partially demonstrated - but you still need an implementation -- so what is left? Like the Cheshire cat, nothing except the software itself: Consistent logical links operating in a bootstrapping reflexive emergent manner. Bruno is right in applying math/logic to solve the consciousness/physical world (Mind/Body) riddle. Physics can be derived from machine psychology. George Russell Standish wrote: If I can sumarise George's summary as this: In order to generate a recording, one must physically instantiate the conscious computation. Consciousness supervenes on this, presumably. Maudlin say aha - lets take the recording, and add to it an inert machine that handles the counterfactuals. This combined machine is computationally equivalent to the original. But since the new machine is physically equivalent to a recording, how could consciousness supervene on it. If we want to keep supervenience, there must be something noncomputational that means the first machine is conscious, and the second not. Marchal says consciousness supervenes on neither of the physical machines, but on the abstract computation, and there is only one consciousness involved (not two). Of course, this all applies to dreaming machines, or machines hooked up to recordings of the real world. This is where I concentrate my attack on the Maudlin argument (the Multiverse argument). Cheers --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---